(A) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a novel method and apparatus for user identification and access control based on permuted kernels. The scheme is unrelated to encryption and secrecy.
(B) Prior Art
In 1985 Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff proposed a new type of interactive proof system which reveals no knowledge whatsoever about the assertion except its validity. The practical significance of these proofs was demonstrated in 1986 by Fiat and Shamir, who showed how to use zero knowledge proofs to establish user identities and to digitally sign messages, see U.S. Pat. No. 4,748,668. The particular proof system proposed by Fiat and Shamir was based on the difficulty of extracting square roots modulo composite numbers, and it was much faster and at least as secure as the known RSA scheme (see U.S. Pat. No. 4,405,829).